A dramatised reading of the novel and about its author, the Estonian writer Jaan Kross

A pastor who writes a chronicle: not really unusual, as history shows. But what does this pastor, Balthasar Rüssow from Reval/Tallinn, have to do with Pomerania?

Much more than it might seem at first glance. For without Pomerania, his life’s journey would never have been possible – nor would his chronicle ever have become famous. For when Rüssow was born almost 500 years ago, no one would have thought it conceivable that he, the son of an Estonian cartwright, would one day be on a par with the wealthy German merchants of the old Hanseatic city. This became possible because the bright young boy was sent to Stettin to study theology. And his *Chronicle of the Province of Lyffland*, which earned him the wrath of many powerful contemporaries, was first printed in Rostock, then in a second edition in Barth in 1584.

The life of Balthasar Rüssow has been chronicled by the Estonian author Jaan Kross, who has spanned a century, in the biographical novel of the same name. Like his fictional character Rüssow, the author Jaan Kross also saw himself as a chronicler of his country. But the parallels do not end there. Kross had a life as eventful as that of his protagonist: Born in Tallinn in 1920, he completed his law degree at the University of Dorpat/Tartu amidst the turmoil of the war, spent a year in Gestapo custody and several years in exile in Siberia, before settling in Tallinn in 1954 as a freelance writer and translator. In the 1990s, his name was repeatedly mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never actually received it. “I write historical novels because history has already done half the work,” Kross once said, attempting to explain his preference for historical subjects. Kross died in Tallinn in 2007 – a significant European writer and a guardian of Estonian culture and language.

In cooperation with the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe